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1 posted on 02/13/2012 9:28:22 AM PST by Scythian
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To: Scythian
A mysterious epidemic is devastating the Pacific coast of Central America, killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000...

News to Scythian, it's been a decade; it's already here. With only 24,000 deaths in ten years in a region with minimal medical care, it's hardly a major threat either.

2 posted on 02/13/2012 9:32:13 AM PST by Carry_Okie (There has not been a conservative American government for 90 years.)
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To: Scythian
It appears to be related to chemicals used in the agricultural industries in these areas. As the workers are overwhelmingly laborers in the fields.

If it were a ‘disease’ we would see germs or viri; we aren't finding this. I would ‘guess’ (I'm not a doctor)that we are looking for some toxin that isn't well regulated in the poorer countries, like it is here.

Or, this could be the start of a Zombie Apocalypse.

3 posted on 02/13/2012 9:32:58 AM PST by Hodar ( Who needs laws; when this FEELS so right?)
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To: Scythian
Stop modifying the title. The article says nothing of the sort.

For those that didn't bother to read the article, there are a couple of hypotheses. The original one was the use of agricultural chemicals without adequate protection. Now, some believe that the daily cycle of dehydration and heat stress (from working in the fields in a sub-tropical zone) is to blame.

4 posted on 02/13/2012 9:33:37 AM PST by justlurking (The only remedy for a bad guy with a gun is a good WOMAN (Sgt. Kimberly Munley) with a gun)
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To: James Oscar

Ping


5 posted on 02/13/2012 9:34:02 AM PST by OwenKellogg (Gingrich / Robinson 2012!)
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To: Scythian

It’s not a contagious disease. It’s an occupational illness. The article refers to chronic kidney failure that occurs among agricultural and other outdoor laborers and is caused either by exposure to pesticides or by “recurrent dehydration,” meaning that they often do not remain hydrated enough when working outdoors in extreme heat conditions over the years.

So I don’t think it’s likely to come across the border ever.


7 posted on 02/13/2012 9:34:18 AM PST by livius
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To: Scythian

Started when the Chicoms arrived in the Canal Zone.


10 posted on 02/13/2012 9:35:54 AM PST by stuartcr ("In this election year of 12, how deep into their closets will we delve?")
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To: Scythian

Of course if you read the actual article (Which I suspect you didn’t) your addition to the headline is silly.

The best hypothesis is that it is related to constant, repeated dehydration. Not a mention of infectious disease in the article.

The desperate attempts to link disease to illegal immigration are getting a bit ridiculous.

1) Any virulent new virus is going to spread much more rapidly through legal air travel than illegal immigrants walking across the border.

2) Every time there is a thread on drug-resistant infections, people desperately try to link it to illegal immigrants, when, actually, they are a result of ADVANCED health care in the US and Western Europe - you need to actually use advanced antibiotics on people for the bacteria to evolve resistance to them.


11 posted on 02/13/2012 9:36:19 AM PST by Strategerist
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To: Scythian

The consensus is that they are working themselves to death - repeated dehydration and accumulated kidney damage. Exposure to toxins is the next guess, but one would expect women and children also to be affected as toxins tend to spread.

Slaves were worked so hard on sugar plantations in the Caribbean that the average life expectancy was two or three years.

Makes tax-supported, Everglade-wrecking Florida sugar and high fructose corn syrup seem not so bad.


16 posted on 02/13/2012 9:39:13 AM PST by heartwood
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To: Scythian

I have worked with people from every Spanish-speaking country on the planet. Sugar to them is what blood is to a vampire. When I saw the words ‘’kidney’’ and ‘’sugar’’ I knew the problem.


28 posted on 02/13/2012 9:57:07 AM PST by jmacusa (Political correctness is cultural Marxism. I'm not a Marxist.)
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To: Scythian

I read this article. Sugarcaners are worked like dogs. I can absolutely believe they can be worked all day without appropriate water consumption, among other hard conditions and that those conditions could negatively affect them over a lifetime. I have no answers. This is the work they know, this is the only work available and that they are trained for. Makes me think twice about my own level of sugar consumption.. Better efforts need to happen to imnprove their conditions. I hope the story gets some attention. I recall reading stories about the young children working the cane fields..and their teeth rotting out as the sugar cane is the only food they have. Heartbreaking.


29 posted on 02/13/2012 9:57:44 AM PST by SueRae (I can see November from my HOUSE!!!!!!!! 11.06.2012, the Tower of Sauron falls,)
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To: Scythian
This story reminds me of the ‘killer bees terror’ in the 1970s. A highly aggressive and practically indestructible breed of bees was supposedly killing large numbers of people as they blazed a path of death and destruction northward across South and Central America.

If I recall correctly, the ‘killer bees’ were going to arrive in the United States by late 1977 or thereabouts. It was projected by the alarmists that these bees would wipe out a significant portion of the our population, and render most of the southern United States uninhabitable, soon thereafter...

What ever happened to those bees, anyway?

32 posted on 02/13/2012 10:01:34 AM PST by WayneS (Comments now include 25% more sarcasm for no additional charge...)
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To: Scythian

Could there be some very nasty things lying dormant in the ground or in cave systems that modern humans are not ready for?


44 posted on 02/13/2012 10:49:34 AM PST by anglian
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To: Scythian
I'm sure we'll have this mystery solved before the end of the thread and the problem will identified as either DDT in the food chain (even if it's only parts per billion),
sugar in the prerefined state (that means raw cane), virus or other pathogen (if so it would the path of other diseases), maybe acute and chronic dehydration (urinalysis would reveal such as would autopsy).

Myself I'm going with UFO medical experiments. You know...probes, prods, puckered little gray men.

47 posted on 02/13/2012 11:23:29 AM PST by count-your-change (You don't have to be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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